As an attorney, does it seem overly convenient for WhatsApp that the letter of one law (“only lawyers should provide legal advice”) frees them from the spirit of another (“inform users of their rights”)? Or perhaps this a question for a judge?
In other words, finding out your rights is your job. That’s why you should hire your own counsel if you think you’ve been wronged. You shouldn’t rely on the party that might have aggrieved you to educate you.
Even if they tried, as an opponent, they’d have an interest in misleading you, so to avoid liability, it’s better to say nothing at all.
Of course you'd say that as a lawyer. First you invent a language no one else can comprehend and then you recommend I pay you for translation.
If LLMs are good at anything, it's languages. So I am very hopeful the entire legal system will see an overhaul.
> finding out your rights is your job
No. It's the job of the state to educate and make information on this available and comprehensible for everyone. As long as I am paying taxes I expect the services provided to me documented properly.
It’s just English (or whatever the official language of the country you’re in is).
> It's the job of the state to educate and make information on this available
The state does make this information available. It’s still your job to learn it. They’re not going to beam it into your head.
Practicing law is like plumbing. You can try to do it yourself, or you can hire an expert to help. Most people are better off with an expert.
Contracts however, yeah, they're often written to be intractable (but they can also have very necessary complexity).
Having engineers in HN complain that they need to learn something in order to understand it is a pretty bad look.
It's not "just English". There is a reason legal corpus is a separate thing. Just because a language uses the same grammar skeleton doesn't mean it is the same language.
If I were to train a model on all of written English excluding Legal Corpus and then ask it to interpret Legal corpus texts it'd be a disaster. The opposite is also true.
> The state does make this information available.
There was a 2nd part about it being comprehensible. That 2nd part goes hand in hand with my point above. More often than not legal texts are made to scare people away. Thankfully with LLMs we're seeing that changing rapidly. More and more people are able to educate themselves because the knowledge is no more gated behind a cryptic writing only select few can interpret.
And I am sure the next step is rewriting all of it into a human-friendly language.
I still see value in rigorous proceedings and there is value in a lawyer who can help you with strategic advice on legal. But that indeed is more of a plumbing work.
As a lawyer myself and someone who works with lawyers, I assure you that that's not true.
It's similar to engineering: When engineers write papers, commentary, or other works, they're communicating with practitioners who have shared context. It's still English, but you need the requisite context to make sense of it. It's not meant to be exclusive or to keep others out.